Tintin Forums

I have a distant memory of there being a map of the region when I read Tintin as a kid. Are there any editions which contain a map? Reading around it looks like lots of speculation so I'm probably just mixing it up with something else - or perhaps I was looking in atlases to try and work it out myself. I seem to remember Jeddah being on it and being able to piece it together that way but now I can't even seem to find references to Jeddah anywhere either!

Emir Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab: His life and country contains a pretty extensive debate about Khemed, including its geography.

As mentioned in the forum thread which mct16 links to, Hergé made a rough pencil sketch map of Khemed while working on The Red Sea Sharks. It's reproduced in Benoît Peteer's out of print book Tintin and the World of Hergé (and maybe it's also in more recent books about Hergé's work, though I'm not sure) so maybe that's what your distant memory is of, sondonista.

Thanks for the link to that very interesting thread.

As far as I can tell, the map in my mind seems to bear a close resemblance to the one mentioned in that thread found in "Tintin at Sea" with Wadesdah on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah.

However this doesn't work for me as my memory would be from before that book (or that of Benoit Peters for that matter) was published.

Memory is a funny thing of course! I think that I just must have tried to work it out myself with an atlas and the references to Mecca in Red Sea Sharks (is there also one to Jeddah? I can't recall) simply allowed me to fill in the blanks for myself at the time.